Gwenesther Manning v. LOUIS DeJOY, Postmaster General

United States Court of Appeals
For the Seventh Circuit
Chicago, Illinois 60604
Submitted April 4, 2024*
Decided April 8, 2024
Before
FRANK H. EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge
AMY J. ST. EVE, Circuit Judge
CANDACE JACKSON-AKIWUMI, Circuit Judge
No. 23-2162
GWENESTHER MANNING,
Plaintiff-Appellant,
v.
LOUIS DeJOY, Postmaster General,
Defendant-Appellee.
Appeal from the United States District
Court for the Northern District of
Illinois, Eastern Division.
No. 21 C 1440
Ronald A. Guzmán,
Judge.
O R D E R
The United States Postal Service removed Gwenesther Manning from her job as a
letter carrier after she submitted forms from her doctors recommending that she have a
sedentary job. Manning then sued the Postal Service, alleging that, by halting her work
* We have agreed to decide the case without oral argument because the briefs and
record adequately present the facts and legal arguments, and oral argument would not
significantly aid the court. F ED. R. A PP . P. 34(a)(2)(C).
NONPRECEDENTIAL DISPOSITION
To be cited only in accordance with F ED. R. APP . P. 32.1

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No. 23-2162 Page 2
as a letter carrier, it retaliated against her in violation of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.
According to Manning, the retaliation was for having sought time off to prepare an
employment complaint. The district court entered summary judgment for the Postal
Service. Because Manning did not adequately contest the Postal Service’s statement of
facts, which shows that it removed her from her job for a lawful reason—a sincere belief
based on her medical forms that she could not perform her job—we affirm.
After Manning did not submit admissible evidence contesting the Postal
Service’s statement of facts, the district court deemed them admitted. We recount those
facts in the light most favorable to Manning. McCurry v. Kenco Logistics Servs., LLC,
942 F.3d 783, 787 (7th Cir. 2019). This case centers on events leading up to March 2018.
In the prior two months, Manning gave the Postal Service two reports from her doctors
describing her physical limitations. The doctors urged the Postal Service to move her
from her current job into a sedentary position or allow her to take disability-based
retirement. On March 2, Manning submitted a form to “request[ ] a temporary light
duty assignment.” The form required her to “attach[ ] appropriate medical
documentation.” She did not, believing that her medical restrictions “were already on
file.” The next day, March 3, Tiffany Bates began supervising Manning. On Bates’s first
day, Manning told Bates that she had a “back condition,” but she gave no details.
On March 29, Manning submitted another request in which she sought “official
time” (that is, paid time off) to work on an “EEO [equal employment opportunity]
complaint.” Bates replied that she would ask about the Postal Service’s policy for
paying employees for such matters. The next day, March 30, based on the forms
Manning had previously submitted to the Postal Service stating that she should not
work as a letter carrier, Bates sent Manning home. Bates explained to Manning that the
Postal Service could not yet consider Manning’s request for light-duty work because
Manning had failed to attach necessary medical documentation to her request form.
Bates urged Manning to submit a completed form to enable her to return to work.
Manning pursued administrative remedies. First, she brought an employment
charge alleging that Bates retaliated against her by relieving her of work on March 30.
Following Bates’s advice, she also submitted a new request for light-duty work,
attaching the required documents. When the Postal Service denied that request, citing
the lack of light-duty jobs, Manning brought a second employment charge alleging that
the Postal Service wrongly failed to accommodate her need for light-duty work. The
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled in Manning’s favor on that failure-

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No. 23-2162 Page 3
to-accommodate charge. Manning did not, however, obtain a favorable administrative
ruling on her first charge that Bates had retaliated against her.
Manning responded with this suit under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, 29 U.S.C.
§ 794(a). In the suit, she contends that Bates sent her home from work on March 30 to
retaliate for her request to have “official time” to work on an equal-employment matter.
(Manning also raised a claim of discrimination, but she has withdrawn it.) The Postal
Service moved for summary judgment based on its statement of facts. Manning did not
dispute with admissible evidence the content of that statement. Instead, she argued that
much of the evidence was relevant only to her withdrawn claim of discrimination. The
district court overruled Manning’s objection, explaining that the evidence provided
essential context; it then deemed the otherwise uncontested facts admitted. On the
merits of the retaliation claim, the court ruled against Manning. It reasoned that,
although her request for “official time” came just one day before her removal, that
timing alone was insufficient to rebut the Postal Service’s uncontested statement that it
removed Manning because she could not perform her job. Manning’s motion under
Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 59(e) was unavailing.
On appeal, Manning contends that a jury could find that her request to Bates for
“official time” to work on an equal-employment complaint caused Bates to send her
home the next day. A retaliation claim under the Rehabilitation Act is governed by the
same standards applied to the Americans with Disabilities Act. Vargas v. DeJoy, 980 F.3d
1184, 1188 n.4 (7th Cir. 2020); 29 U.S.C. § 794(d). Those standards require Manning to
establish a “but for causal connection” between “protected activity” (which we will
assume was her request for paid time off) and an adverse outcome (the decision that
she could no longer work as a letter carrier). See Parker v. Brooks Life Sci., Inc., 39 F.4th
931, 936 (7th Cir. 2022) (internal quotation marks omitted). We review de novo the
district court’s decision at summary judgment that insufficient evidence supports
Manning’s claim that her request for time off was the but-for cause of Bates’s decision
that she could not work as a letter carrier. See Vargas, 980 F.3d at 1188.
Manning contends that the suspicious timing between Bates sending her home
and her request the day before for “official time” would allow a jury to infer that the
latter caused the former. But on this record that timing alone is insufficient for her to
survive summary judgment. Suspicious timing “combined with additional evidence of
pretext” can justify a trial on causation, but “[s]uspicious timing alone” is “rarely”
enough. See Parker, 39 F.4th at 937 (citation omitted). This is not one of those rare cases.
Manning does not cite any evidence suggesting that Bates’s stated reason for sending

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her home—Bates’s acceptance of Manning’s conceded inability to perform her job—was
a lie. To the contrary, the evidence of the sincerity of Bates’s belief that Manning could
not work as a letter carrier is undisputed: Shortly before Bates ordered Manning off her
letter-carrier job, Manning had given the Postal Service work-restriction forms in which
her doctors urged sedentary work or disability retirement for her. Manning also had
requested light-duty work in lieu of her letter-carrier job, and she told Bates that she
had a back condition. Then, on the day that Bates sent Manning home, Bates urged her
to file a new light-duty request with the correct attachments. Finally, Bates stated,
without contradiction from Manning, that she relied on the materials Manning had
submitted in deciding to send Manning home. We recognize that the day before she
sent Manning home, Bates also said that she would follow up on Manning’s request for
“official time” off. But no evidence suggests that Bates (or anyone else) was bothered by
this request. Thus, no reasonable juror could infer from this record that Bates lied about
why she sent Manning home. See id. at 938.
Manning responds that it is “plausible” that Bates reacted not just to Manning’s
request for “official time,” but also to Manning’s previous complaints that predated
Bates’s arrival as Manning’s supervisor. Manning is entitled to reasonable inferences as
the non-movant, but nothing other than speculation suggests that Bates knew about or
reacted to these prior complaints. And speculation cannot overcome summary
judgment. See Matthews v. Waukesha County, 759 F.3d 821, 824 (7th Cir. 2014).
We have considered Manning’s remaining arguments, but our preceding
discussion adequately disposes of them.
AFFIRMED

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